NATIVE SON
Saturday, April 21st, 2018Lead performances are powerhouse and production design one of the year’s most electrifying, but Richard Wright’s 20th-century classic Native Son is ill-served at Antaeus Theatre Company by Nambi E. Kelley’s 21st-century stage adaptation’s temporal zigzags, sledgehammer approach to issues of race, and the addition of a “character” not found in the original novel.
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WHAT HAPPENED WHEN
Thursday, April 19th, 2018The survivor of a horrific childhood is visited by ghosts of his dark and desolate past in Daniel Talbott’s memory play What Happened When, now getting an exquisitely designed Echo Theater Company West Coast Premiere unfortunately made more cryptic than already written by one bad casting choice.
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LITTLE BLACK SHADOWS
Tuesday, April 17th, 2018Kemp Powers’ Little Black Shadows takes an intriguing concept (the lives of teenage house slaves serving white teen masters in early-1850s Georgia), then veers off track into family dysfunction, folktales, magical realism, and a couple of weird plot twists that left me scratching my head despite the best efforts of a Grade-A cast headed by the simply sensational Giovanni Adams and Chauntae Pink.
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THE MADRES
Wednesday, March 28th, 2018
Playwright Stephanie Alison Walker pays tribute to the women who would not be silenced when their sons and daughters started disappearing by the thousands during the “dirty war” waged by the Argentine military dictatorship on its own citizens beginning in the mid-1970s in The Madres, another powerhouse Skylight Theatre World Premiere.
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A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS
Monday, March 26th, 2018
Actors Co-op brings 16th-century English history to vibrant life with their 21st-century revival of the 1962 Best Play Tony winner A Man For All Seasons, Robert Bolt’s thought-provoking if overlong look at Sir Thomas More, torn between moral conscience and political expediency during Henry VIII’s reign as King.
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AN UNDIVIDED HEART
Sunday, March 18th, 2018
Pedophile Catholic priests and toxic waste-dumping chemical plants form the backdrop of Yusuf Toropov’s An Undivided Heart, a Circle X. Theatre Co./Echo Theater Company World Premiere that despite occasional tonal inconsistency and lack of clarity proves a powerful indictment of church-and-corporation-sanctioned abuse.
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A RAISIN IN THE SUN
Monday, March 5th, 2018
A Raisin In The Sun, Lorraine Hansberry’s piercing look at racial discrimination, gender roles, family values, and burgeoning African-American identity in the pre-Civil Rights Era 1950s gets revived to powerful effect at Pasadena’s A Noise Within.
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A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE
Sunday, March 4th, 2018
Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire undergoes a radical reinvention at The Theatre @ Boston Court where director Michael Michetti has transposed the seven-decade-old classic to 21st-century New Orleans to stunning effect.
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Since 2007, Steven Stanley's StageSceneLA.com has spotlighted the best in Southern California theater via reviews, interviews, and its annual StageSceneLA Scenies.
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